But don’t you [all Christians] be called guides/teachers/leaders for one is your leader even Christ and all of you are [equal] brethren --Matthew 23:8 [1]
[1] Strong's G2519 – kathēgētēs (Guide/Leader/Teacher--not master)
In this passage, Jesus refutes the complementarian claim
that men are always leaders of women and that women must always follow men.
The
compound word Jesus used here, which was translated as master, is the Greek
word kathēgētēs. A
word which is only used 3 times in two verses in the entire New Testament. By
using the word kathēgētēs,
Jesus portrayed the leading as a downward flow (from Heaven) to only one leader/teacher--Himself.
In ascribing the word kathēgētēs to himself alone, Jesus raised women from
historically degraded roles as “followers,” a role which had wrongly been imposed upon
them for millennia. With this one declaration, Jesus raised women back to their
equal status with men (which God had never taken from them) at their creation Genesis
1:26, 5:1-2
By declaring only one leader and calling all Christians
adelphos, “brethren” [which in this case, the word is neutral including both women
and men], Jesus removed any foundation for male headship within HIS EKKLESIA [His
Body, His Church].
This accords perfectly with 1 Peter 5:5, a verse which was eliminated
from the New Testament when the Egyptian/Alexandrian Minority Texts were edited
into classical Greek [the written language of the highly educated] from the Koine Greek [the written language of the every-day people]. It is universally acknowledged that the Greek New Testament was originally written in the Koine. Despite this, Classical
Greek texts underlie the New Testament portion of most English translations
since the late 1800’s and are given precedence over the koine.
The language of Jesus in Matthew chapter twenty-three
and the text of 1 Peter 5:5, levels the ground between the sexes, eliminating
gender-based and man-made leader and follower "roles." Jesus declared only one
leader for every one of his followers, and Peter commanded all Christians to
*submit to one another. These are but two examples of many [in the New Testament]
and why this writer coined the term, “**Received Text Friend of Women.”
*When all New Testament uses of the Greek word “hypotasso” [translated
as “submit”] are taken as a whole and within context, it cannot be claimed that the
word is used in a military-like hierarchical way or that the word always means arrayed
“under.” Indeed there is one biblical example where the word is translated as “over” and not under. In the Greek texts of the New Testament, when referencing human relationships within Christianity, the word is consistently written the middle voice (grammar/linguistically) and connotes a yielding as in "preferring one another before ourselves--The golden rule for both sexes.
**Warning: Though the Received Text [Textus Receptus TR]
is consistently “woman friendly,” the English translation of the TR is not always. A few more terms coined by this writer are "English-Translation-Theology" and "Gender-Biased-English-Translation-Theology."
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